Running With Books

October 15, 2007 · 10:53 am

Environmental Lessons

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day? One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

Well that would be Blog Action Day. And that would be today. And the issue, or theme as it were?

The Environment

What, you may ask, do I know about the environment? Well, I know a little. I know that environmental science was my favorite subject in high school oh so many years ago. And I know that when I was in college and decided to change majors, I thought back to my high school days, remembered my love of environmental science, and went to the college’s library to do a bit of research. It was there that I found Geography, a close cousin to environmental science, and the major I finally settled on.

If you reviewed my college transcripts from those days, you’d see that I focused much of my time and college studies on environmental hazards. Scary hazards like tornados and earthquakes and global warming and the human toll and the human response necessary to deal with to such incidents. I loved those courses and up until the horror and disaster of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I would have told you that my perfect job, if I could get it, would be to work for FEMA. As the agency’s director. But after witnessing that embarrassment, I’ve more or less changed my mind. Plus, I have a young child and I don’t think I’m up to all the travel a job like that would entail.

And then there’s the fact that I don’t always do everything that I probably could be doing to help the environment. I think they might ask you questions about your contributions toward saving the environment for positions like that. You see, I don’t recycle much. Papers, sure. Beer bottles, sometimes. I just don’t have it in me to wash and rinse and sort ALL the varieties of trash we generate in a day. My husband though, he’s much more on top of all of that. So while I don’t do much, he more or less makes up for my slack. Except for when he rinses out a bottle or jar and leaves it on the kitchen counter for what I deem an unacceptable length of time. Then I throw it away in the regular trash can, with the chicken bones and old bread crusts.

Also, I don’t generally buy organic foods. My most recent foray into the organic world was when I bought a bunch of fruit from Whole Foods, and with it, a bunch of fruit flies that I am still trying to vanquish from my home. I’ve decided that from now I will stick to the pesticide laden apples and bananas that I can buy from my local grocery store. I’ve rarely seen a fruit fly with a stomach of steel required to feast on that kind of fruit. Plus, the well preserved fruits and vegetables don’t tend to rot during my drive home from the store.

I do however, remember the lessons I learned about the environment as a child, and I try to instill at least those values in my son:

People start pollution; people can stop it. So don’t litter. It will poison the water, the air will turn black with smoke, the fishes will die and the Indian Chief will cry.

Smoky Bear says “Only you can prevent wild fires.” So don’t play with matches.

Close the door, you’re letting bugs in.

Close the door. What are you trying to do, heat the neighborhood?

Don’t leave the door to the refrigerator hanging open. What are you trying to do, cool the entire house?

Turn off the lights when you leave a room, you’re wasting electricity! Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Eat your vegetables. There are starving children in other countries who would be happy to have your vegetables! (and by the way, piling them into a napkin and offering to mail those vegetables to the starving children will get you sent to your room faster than you can blink).

Don’t touch wild animals! Do you want to get rabies?

and finally…

Stay on the path. Do you want to get poison ivy?

On top of all that there is a new lesson, one I’ve only come to appreciate since my son was born. TOY MANUFACTURERS USE WAY TOO MUCH PACKAGING. Seriously. Is toy theft that big of a problem? A simple Star Wars Action figure, for example, is held in place by something like a dozen twist ties when it’s already encased in cardboard and plastic. My son wants to play with the toy RIGHT NOW, but it takes me forty minutes to free the toy from its twist tie asylum…

I’ll make this promise right now: If toy manufacturers stop it with all the twist ties, I will do my part and recycle the cardboard part of the packaging. Given that my son is six with years of toy ownership ahead of him, that action alone could make a big difference for the environment.

4 Comments

Filed under blog action day, packaging, recycle, Star Wars, the environment, toys

October 11, 2007 · 1:08 am

Snippets

As I was driving to work today there was a very nice looking Cadillac SUV in front of me. It had a vanity plate that said 4 God. And below that, on the plate’s frame, was this:

Everything I Have Is

And I thought, even your Cadillac? Really? How do you plan to get that pretty SUV up to God’s house in Heaven? Are you driving it to him? Right now? Or is it already his and maybe he’s letting you borrow it, drive it around down here for while?

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My husband and I have been married for 14 years now. Our Wedding Anniversary was this past Tuesday. On that very night I heard my son say to my husband, “I wish you and mom would get a divorce already!” My husband was taken aback. I heard him ask “Why? Why do you want us to get a divorce?” to which my son responded, “Because then I could marry mom!” My husband assured him that even if he did come around and divorce me, that Snags still wouldn’t be allowed to marry his mother. There are laws against that you know.

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I was out on a long run recently when I came upon two men running toward me. I caught just a snippet of their conversation but it was enough to make me turn around to get a second glance at the speaker. He said to his friend, “Yeah, it’s dangerous, but I do it anyway.” I wondered if he thought he came across as brave, because I thought he came across as stupid, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see his picture linked to a Darwin Award next year. I am actually hoping to see this, so I can find out WHAT the dangerous thing he used to do was.

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I cannot sew. I’m not proud of that, but it’s true, and I don’t try to hide the fact. That is why I buy my son’s Halloween costumes. This year, as you might have guessed, he’s going to be Darth Vader. There is a kid in our neighborhood who copies my son’s every move and ends up with the same costume every year. This irritates my son and me to no end, and this year, as expected, neighbor kid is dressing as Darth Vader. But neighbor kid’s mom is oblivious and happy because she has a cardboard Darth Vader mask and has decided that she can dress her kid in black pants and black shirt, and voila, she’s made a Darth Vader costume. My son heard her telling me about this and he said “You aren’t supposed to MAKE Halloween costumes! You are supposed to BUY them!” Neighbor kid’s mom was not happy about that comment. I suspect she will be considerably unhappier when she sees Snags dressed in his store bought Darth Vader finest on the 31st.

7 Comments

Filed under Halloween, humor, kids, life, religion, running

October 9, 2007 · 1:06 am

The Field Trip

You know that movie Children of the Corn? I think I know how the kids came to live in the corn. They were originally a kindergarten class on a fall field trip to a corn maze and the chaperones, well, they got hot and tired of walking in circles through the corn, so they told the kids they were going off to get the kids their lunches and they’d be right back…

Only, you know, they didn’t come right back. They didn’t come back at all. Instead they hopped aboard the school bus that brought them all there in the first place, and they took off, never to return.

Or at least, that’s how I imagined it happened.

In reality, us chaperones, we stayed. For the whole day. Leading children out of the corn. Some of whom, guessing by their behavior, their parents might have been thrilled if we had left them there. But like I said, we didn’t.

I know I should be thankful that I made it back alive, and just let it rest at that, but I have some questions I feel a need to get answers for:

1. If the instructions given to the chaperones said for the chaperones to wear a watch, then why weren’t the teachers who wrote the instructions wearing watches? Tell me, teachers, why did you keep asking ME what time it was?

2. Why weren’t the teachers chaperoning any children? How did you manage to pass them all off on the parent volunteers so the six of you could enjoy some relative quiet time at the corn maze?

3. Does anybody know what kind of parent sends their child off on a filed trip without a brown bag lunch? The field trip form specified a brown bag lunch. A carton of chocolate milk is not, in my book, a brown bag lunch. It is a drink. And without refrigeration on a 90 degree day, the milk was likely curdled by the time your son got to drink it. I was too unnerved to check. But just so you know, parent who didn’t bother to send a lunch, the school cafeteria supplied an emergency brown bag lunch for your child. But he claimed to not like the peanut butter and jelly Uncrustables, the apple juice, or the cookies that were packed inside. So, his lunch at the corn maze consisted of two sips of warm, curdled chocolate milk.

4. And Snags? Hello! What was with the pedal car? Why couldn’t you steer the thing? I know you wanted to ride the car around the whole race track, but you kept wrecking into the tires and bales of hay. After 10 minutes of watching this I had to make you GET OUT OF THE CAR, NOW! NOW! LET’S GO OR THE BUS WILL LEAVE WITHOUT US! And so you didn’t get to ride them very far at all, and neither did your friend who somehow survived the long hot afternoon on only two sips of chocolate milk. I’m sorry, really, I am, but it wasn’t my fault. Learn how to steer or you will not, I repeat, WILL NOT be getting your driver’s license when you turn 16.

5 Comments

Filed under corn maze, field trip, humor

October 4, 2007 · 12:19 pm

The Assignment

The instructions were as follows:

Examples were provided:

I read the instructions and went over the examples with Snags. We made a list of things he might want to include in his picture dictionary. The list contained items like: penguins, turtles, our dog, Luke Skywalker, soccer.

Confident that Snags understood what he was supposed to do, I left him with pencils and crayons and scissors and glue and I turned to the stove to get dinner underway.

It wasn’t long before I heard Snags call, “I’m done!”

I went to check.

This is what I found:

It seems that instead of a picture dictionary, Snags had created a Movie Guide to Star Wars.

Yes, that is my handwriting above each character. I wrote their names because:

a. the instructions said I could help

b. I didn’t feel like spelling each name out one letter at a time while Snags wrote them down, and

c. Dinner was still cooking on the stove

Here are some close-ups:

I don’t recall a scene in Star Wars where they eat cake. Perhaps Jabba the Hutt served cake at one of his odd parties? Or maybe cake just made it onto the page because Snags was doing this homework assignment on his birthday.

His teacher hasn’t seen it yet. It’s due tomorrow.

***************************************************

Author’s note: This post would not have been possible without the help I recieved from the wonderful Jo at Jo Beaufoix. She told me how to insert photos into my post without breaking my sidebar. Thanks, Jo!

9 Comments

Filed under cake, homework, Snags, Star Wars

October 2, 2007 · 1:20 pm

Evil Genius Turns Six (or Happy Birthday Snags!)

My son turns six years old today. It’s kind of unbelievable to look back at photographs from when he was born and remember the tiny baby he was, versus now, the child he has become.

He was a tiny thing, just 6 pounds, 12 ounces, and 19 ½ inches long. Today he’s close to 60 pounds and just shy of 4 feet tall.

Back then he didn’t speak, he slept a lot and cried. Now he won’t stop talking and he wakes up way too early in the mornings. He still cries, but mostly only when he’s hurt or very mad.

Back then, as I struggled with my new role as a mother, I came upon a quote that immediately and ever since became one of my favorite quotes about parenting: The days are long but the years are short. I don’t know who said that, but I believe that those are truest words ever spoken. How did we get here? Six years down the road from where we started? The past is nearly all a blur. That’s partly, I think, why I started writing. To document the stories of our lives before they become blurry too. The past… eventually it eludes us, stands just beyond our grasp laughing at us and at what we can’t remember because we are too busy dealing with the here and now. And so I take the time to write things down before I forget them, before I get too busy with the next thing. I will collect these stories, and one day I will publish them. Most likely it will be my own personal endeavor, a book made on Blurb or somewhere similar, and bought only by myself. But I will give the book to Snags. And when he is 25 or 38 or 46 he can look back and remember with me, or with his own children, the things that we might have otherwise forgotten.

There’s a gentleman that I know who through the years has asked about my son and told me about his son, already an adult. This man came to the conclusion, from the stories I told him about Snags, that my son was destined for greatness. “The only thing is,” he said, “I’m not sure if he’s going to be the President of the United States or a criminal mastermind. You are going to have your hands full,” he warned. “Keep on top of your son, nurture his skills, and push him toward good. He’s smart… too smart, too crafty and too mischievous, he could go either way. It’s your job to lead him in the right direction.”

And I’m trying, I really am. But the other night I got a little taste of what the future might hold, and this kid of mine, he may turn out to be an Evil Genius despite my best efforts. It was bedtime and I was reading out loud about the planet Saturn from a book called 4000 Things You Should Know. “Saturn,” the book states, “is so massive, the pressure at its heart is enough to turn hydrogen solid. That is why there is a layer of metallic hydrogen around the planet’s inner core of rock.” And it goes on to explain that “Saturn is not solid, but is made almost entirely of gas, mostly liquid hydrogen and helium. Only in the planet’s very small core is there any solid rock.”

I tried to explain that in terms I thought an almost six year old would understand, so I explained that air is a gas and that if it were on Saturn it would turn it into solid chunks.

I continued reading and after a few minutes Snags interrupted and said, “Okay! We need to destroy Saturn. We need to BLOW. IT. UP!” I looked at my son, innocent child turned comic book villain, and said no, that wasn’t right. We shouldn’t do that. But then I proceed to ask him why he thought we should blow up Saturn.

“Because,” he said, “there is no oxygen is space. That’s because Saturn takes it all and turns it into rocks. So if we destroy Saturn the rocks will turn back into air and people will be able to breathe in space!”

I laughed. “Okay,” I said. “I see your reasoning. That sounds logical, but I don’t think I explained this right… We don’t breathe the type of gas that Saturn turns into a solid. That’s hydrogen, and we are breathing air which is made up of mostly nitrogen and oxygen, not hydrogen…”

The next day, as I was shopping for Snags’ birthday present in Target, I was thinking about his plan to blow up Saturn. I had to consider whether or not I was the best person to lead Snags away from the dark side…

I was in one of the toy aisles and reaching out to take hold of a Star Wars transformer that could turn from an X-Wing into Luke Skywalker. As luck would have it, it was the very last one they had. And just as my fingertips brushed the package, a little boy zipped down the aisle at breakneck speed and grabbed the toy off the hook it was hanging from. Right from under my hand! The child’s mother saw this and reprimanded him, told him to give the toy back to me, that I was looking at it and going to buy it. The child handed the toy over to me, and I thanked him and then his mother. I thought that was the end of our conversation.

But then the woman asked me “Are you going to buy that?” and I said “Yes, I was thinking about it.” To which she puffed herself up like the Wicked Witch of ~~the West~~ Target and huffed “THINKING ABOUT AND BUYING ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS! WHICH IS IT?!”

I was stunned. It took me a moment but when I recovered from her verbal slap I said I was going to buy it. Then, for fun, I continued to look at other Star Wars toys on the shelves, pulling them down, turning them over, reading the back and looking like I was weighing their merits against the transformer I said I was buying.

Eventually, I tuned my cart around and pushed my way out of the aisle. I stopped to look at another toy, one that Snags has asked for before. I pulled it off the shelf and put it in my cart. Then I turned down the Barbie aisle, pulled the X-Wing/Luke Skywalker Transformer from my cart, and shoved it behind a bunch of Barbie Dolls. I decided that I wasn’t going to buy it, but neither was the witch in the Star Wars aisle. And that’s why I am not sure I will be much help when it comes to stopping my little evil genius from blowing up Saturn. It’s for a good cause, after all.

4 Comments

Filed under birthday, humor, Luke Skywalker, parenting, Saturn, Snags, Star Wars, transformers

September 28, 2007 · 12:36 pm

My Bad

I jammed up the elementary school’s traffic circle this morning. And I’m not sure, but I think the traffic circle parent police and the vice-principal may have taken down my license number. So I expect a call sometime later today, if not an actual visit from the crossing guard and a real state policeman, possibly banning me from the circle forever. They can do that you know.

But it’s not my fault. Not really. I mean, normally I walk Snags to school each morning. The cold front that the weatherman was calling for was supposed to move through over night and dump all its marble size raindrops then. And it did, at least some of it. I mean, I heard the thunder and the rain last night. It started right when I started watching The Office, and at the exact moment when Snags got out of bed crying that he’d hurt himself, scratched his eye.

That turned out to be his eye lid, but one look at his claw like fingernails convinced me he’d be a bloody mess by morning if I didn’t do something right then. So I trimmed his nails, cleaned off his eyelid scratch, and sent him back to bed amid the rain and thunder and my trying to catch all of the funniness that is The Office.

This morning was supposed to dawn clear and bright and chilly, but I take it the weather Gods didn’t get that notice from the weather man at our local television station. Because instead, the sky was that odd blue color, the one somewhere between an enthusiastic cobalt and a depressing gray, the one that means it might be getting ready to rain, hard. Or it might simply be the old rain burning away from the sun behind it. And only a little more time will reveal what is to be…

I kept looking out the window, and as luck would have it, everything was fine until the very. last. second. And then the sky split open.

But I’m flexible, so I said to Snags, “Get in the car. I’m driving you to school.” And Snags complained. He wanted to walk. I would have walked, really, I would have. But I promised a neighbor friend who is out of town on a cruise vacation, that I would walk her son to school each morning, leaving her mother-in-law babysitter to tend to my friend’s young twins in the morning without having to cart them up to school and back like my friend usually does.

I figured two small boys with backpacks, lunch bags, and umbrellas might not be the thing to mix with a downpour and a deadline. School has a definite starting time, and puddles are the devils snare to that.

So I picked my neighbor’s son up and in less than 2 minutes we had pulled into the school’s traffic circle. I followed the rules, I followed the cars and stopped where I was supposed to. But then I had to get out of my car to help the boys out. The doors have to be opened by hand, they don’t glide away like those on all the minivans that were surrounding me. One door has a child lock on it so Snags couldn’t open it even if he wanted to. The other, well, that door would have opened into the traffic. So I got out and opened Snags’ door to let the boys out onto the sidewalk.

Only they are five, in Kindergarten, and not fast. Not fast like the 3rd and 4th graders hopping out of the cars in front of us. So by the time I got them out of the car and back into their backpacks and put their umbrellas up and gave Snags a kiss, and hopped back into my car, I was the ONLY car left in the circle. All the cars that had been in front of me had vanished. But all the world was behind me waiting, waiting, waiting to pull in.

That’s when I noticed the looks. The disdain. The shaking of heads. You’d have thought I was sitting there reading a map for 20 minutes, or talking on my cell phone and had missed the green light. But honestly, when I got home and looked at the clock, I had been gone for a grand total of 6 minutes. So I couldn’t have jammed up the traffic circle for too long. But apparently, jamming it up at all is a CRIME.

So I am off to dig out the TRAFFIC CIRCLE RULES paper. The one I didn’t fully read when it came home because I didn’t expect to be driving Snags to school. It’s not MY fault it started raining this morning. And I can tell you one thing… If I end up going to jail for this, the weather man, he’s going down with me.

7 Comments

Filed under humor, life, school, traffic, weather

September 27, 2007 · 12:00 am

Soccer

Snags is playing soccer this fall but if you sat and watched the practices and games, you’d think he thought I’d signed him up for Conversation 101. All he does during practice is stand in line for the various soccer drills and talk to the kids around him. The coach is forever calling “Snags! Are you ready?”

Last weekend his team played their first game. And by game I mean scrimmage and also I mean there were no referees or anybody “official” on the field. Well, save for the two fathers turned soccer coaches, that is. And I only count them as officials because they had whistles.

When you are five and playing soccer, the field is pretty small and your teammates are both boys and girls. Your team uniform consists of matching t-shirts for all the players.

There are no fouls: no yellow or red cards. There are no free kicks or penalty kicks. But that is probably because there are hardly any kicks at all. Mostly the team runs in a large clump, like a herd of small animals, chasing the ball around the field. If and when some hapless player does manage to strike the ball with his or her foot, it’s usually by accident and out of bounds, or into their own goal. Nothing says team quite like scoring a goal against your own, now does it?

Since the games are more or less unofficial in this age group, each team member gets to take a turn trying out various positions on the field. They can play one of three broadly defined positions: offense, defense, or goalie.

The goalie’s job is the easiest here. The ball so rarely comes anywhere near the goal, the goalie can take a nap if he wants to and still be 99.9% guaranteed that nobody will score on him while he snoozes. Except maybe that kid from his own team…

But back to my kid…the whole time Snags was playing defense he stood there sentinel, not moving except to chew on a finger shoved so far into his mouth it looked like he was trying to force himself, like some high fashion runway model with an eating disorder, to vomit.

I don’t know what he was looking at but it’s safe to say it wasn’t the ball, or the rest of the team as they came charging at him and he stood there, as if behind glass, or as if he was watching the action before him on a television set in Best Buy. Occasionally he’d swat at a bee that flew his way, but that was it as far as motion goes.

The coach tried to get his attention: “Snags! Get ready, the ball is coming right at you! Run to it! Snags! Look! The Ball!” Eventually his coach gave up and called for the other defensive player, Tony, to take the ball. And so did Snags. As the ball came his way I heard Snags say, “Get the ball, Tony!” even though clearly it should have been Snags’ ball. Being as it landed right as his feet.

Another kid on the team, Paul, isn’t much better though. He doesn’t move unless the coach Calls. His. Name. His mom stands at the sidelines yelling instructions: “Paul, go get the ball, run after it, kick the ball Paul!” And Paul shakes his head and hollers back, “But the coach didn’t Call. My. Name!”

And Paul may have a point there. I noticed that the coach is more than a little vague in describing the rules and roles and the various soccer skills to the kids. These kids are 5 and 6 years old, playing in a league where five is the minimum age for starting to play. Meaning, most if not all of the kids on the team have never played before. On the first day of practice, for example, the coach told the kids to dribble the ball. One child picked up their soccer ball and started to dribble it like a basketball. The coach sounded a bit annoyed as he said, “No! No HANDS! Don’t pick up the ball with your hands! This isn’t basketball!” He sounded, I thought, like Tom Hanks in the movie A League of Their Own, where he yells all aghast, “There’s no crying in baseball!”

So the children heard “no hands in soccer”, only to be told later, when they played the position of goalie, “Go get the ball! Pick it up with your HANDS!” So I think they might be just a little confused about it all. And I think the coach ought to maybe demonstrate the skill he’s trying to teach. Then again, I tried out for the girls soccer team in high school and didn’t make it, so what do I know?

Since I’m not the coach, I merely sit and watch. I cheer the kids on, cringe when they score on the wrong goal, and hand over Snag’s water bottle when the coach calls for a water break. Oh, yeah, and sometimes I swat at a bee that flies my way.

6 Comments

Filed under coaching, humor, kids, life, Snags, soccer

September 24, 2007 · 1:33 am

Don’t Try This at Home

Snags has the imagination of a crazy person’s reality. A schizophrenic’s perhaps. I don’t know if he actually hears voices, but he certainly holds conversations with invisible people — people that aren’t exactly real, like Darth Vader and The Mystery Gang from Scooby Doo. He once spent weeks, or maybe it was months, talking to Eric and Dr. Kaufman and the Phantom Virus, characters that were in Scooby Doo and The Cyber Chase. Most recently, he’s been holding his hand to his ear as if it were a telephone and having conversations with Darth Vader and The Emperor. And he’s been known to suddenly shout out in the middle of dinner for someone to “STOP FIGHTING OVER THERE WITH YOUR LIGHT SABERS!” Then of course, there’s the fact that Snags has changed his identity many, many, many times over the past few years. I’m not sure how it’s taken me this long to wonder why I haven’t ever hauled him off to the doctor to get this checked out. A visit with a psychiatrist perhaps, to reassure myself that this is just his imagination at play and that he’s not actually CRAZY…

But anyway, given his imagination, I thought it would be fun to make up a story, something utterly impossible and fun, and share it with him. After all, Snags usually likes my made up stories. He often requests them. “Mom,” he asks most nights before bed, “Can I have a telling story? Please? Just one short one before I go to sleep?”

So one afternoon a few weeks ago, I found myself a little bit bored and dare I say sick and tired of listening to Snags having one sided conversations with Darth Vader and the Emperor on his hand phone, and I decided to tell him a story…

But before I tell you more, let me give you a little bit of background on my inspiration for the story, which I took from Pinocchio, my own mother, and Bill Cosby… Pinocchio, you may recall, is the story of a wooden puppet that gets turned into a real live boy. My mother, well she used to tell my brother when he was a kid, that she got him from a shelf in a department store and that she could return him at any time… And that sort of reminded me of Bill Cosby, and that bit where he says something like “…I brought you into this world and I can take you out, make another one that looks just like you…”

It was with those thoughts in mind that I came up with this story. This story that I made up on the spot and thought was a pretty ingenious idea: both brilliant AND funny. So funny, in fact, that I was chuckling in my mind the entire time I was telling it. But oh, the wrath I brought down upon myself!

See, I told Snags that he was originally a baby doll and that I bought him at Toys R Us. Everyone, I told him, all of our family and friends, and even strangers, thought I was crazy for carrying a doll around. So I started to pray to God to turn the doll into a real boy and when he was 7 ½ weeks old, God did! But, the night before that happened, right before I went to bed, I had tossed Snags the doll into my toy box because, well, he was just a doll… But then in the middle of the night a noise woke me up. I heard something crying and there was a bad smell in my room. Our dog had started barking, so I turned on the light to see what all the commotion was about and saw the dog barking at the toy box. I got out of bed, went over to see what was going on, and lo and behold, there was Snags, alive and waving his arms and crying. And he’d pooped his diaper!

I went on to tell Snags that the scar over his eye, the one we’d always told him he got from throwing himself on the floor and hitting his face on a toy when he was a baby, was really from the dog taking him out of the toy box and playing fetch with him when he was still a doll. That, you see, is where the dog’s teeth had scratched his doll head… Now, I thought this was all very funny, but apparently I was wrong.

Snags totally freaked out and screamed and yelled at me. He was so stinking mad I couldn’t believe it. “No!” He screamed. “You’re lying! That’s not true! I was never a doll! Why would you say that? I’m not going to trust you anymore!”

I was taken aback at his outburst and suddenly I felt very defensive. It was just a story, after all. A story I kind of liked, you know, since I made it up (even if Pinocchio and my mother had sort of been the inspiration for it). But still…

In my defensiveness, I’m a little ashamed to admit, I turned into a bit of a child myself and kept insisting the story was true, and that Snags shouldn’t be so upset. In fact, I told him, “You can ask your dad and Uncle Dan when they get here. They’ll tell you this is all true!”

And of course Snags did. He ran screaming to my husband and his Uncle the moment they walked in the front door.

“Dad!” He yelled. “MomsaidIwasadollandGodturnedmeintoaboyandIknowsheslying!”

“What?!” my husband responded. “She said what?”

“MomsaidIwasadollandGodturnedmeintoaboyandIknowsheslying!” Snags repeated.

My husband looked at me, shook his head in disgust and said, “Now WHY would you tell him THAT?” and my brother, Snags’ Uncle, started laughing.

“It’s NOT FUNNY!” Snags cried. “It’s not true, either, is it Uncle Dan?” he insisted.

But my brother, well, he’s a lot like me and can’t resist a good moment when he sees it.

“Well yeah it’s true!” he said, with a big smile spreading across his face.

To which, Snags got even angrier. My husband had to calm him down, and I had to admit that it was just a story. But I still maintained it wasn’t such a big deal and he shouldn’t have gotten so upset about the whole thing.

And my brother, he seemed a little deflated when the truth came out. But I think that’s because up until the point where I had to come clean and admit that the whole “Snags was once a doll” story wasn’t true, my brother was probably thinking that if my mom ever did return him to that department store, at least there was a chance his nephew might be sitting on the shelf next to him.

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Filed under dog, God, humor, identity, insanity, parenting, Scooby Doo, Snags, Star Wars, telling stories

September 21, 2007 · 10:33 am

Why?

How is it, when something really bad happens to somebody good, that the world doesn’t just stop? It seemed so strange to me, to walk outside a few days ago and see that the sun was shining, the sky was robin’s egg blue, the air was cool and breezy, just the perfect temperature. Most people, I imagine, would have declared the day to be “perfect” or “beautiful.” I can even hear the conversations in my mind, of people outside, walking in the park, on their way to lunch “I wish every day could be like this…” and the response, “Yeah, me too! Isn’t this fantastic?”

But most people would not know that a friend of mine just suffered a parent’s worst nightmare, just lost her first child to a stillbirth, little more than a week before the baby was due.

And I cannot fathom it. I swear that on the day it happened the skies should have darkened, storms should have raged, the seas should have churned black waters as lightning bolts were thrown from the heavens. And yet, they didn’t.

The day was bright and clear, in absolute contrast to the drama and horror and sadness that was unfolding in a hospital room across town. The darkness… Darkness of spirit and emotion and grief and pain over a life dreamed of, sought, achieved, nurtured, then lost, in the blink of an eye, for no apparent reason at all. A life that ended even before drawing its very first breath. A life that can now only be remembered for what might have been, was so close to being, but never was… at least not outside the womb.

And yet, other lives go on. People have their daily routines and they continue… lunch dates, business meetings, dinner reservations, homework, television, football practice, errands, music lessons, baths, bedtime, whatever the routines are, for most people, they carry on, the world spins on it’s axis as it always does. This is true for me, and it’s probably true for you too. That’s the way the world works.

But suddenly it seems bizarre that it should work like that. It seems like there should have been some other kind of notice of what was happening, of what had happened. Perhaps a tiny blip in the earth’s rotation, a slight bump, a sudden storm, a “let me have your attention please,” kind of moment. A funny feeling, an intuitive knowledge. A notice other than a ringing phone…

It’s not my tragedy, I know that. But I am a mother. And the loss of a child is the fear of every mother. It hits, as they say, close to home.

And so I grieve for my friend and her husband and their lost child. And I simply wonder WHY? and NOW WHAT?

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Filed under death, loss

September 20, 2007 · 12:15 am

The Fire Drill

Snags has a mortal fear of fire drills. It all started when he was in daycare, somewhere between the ages of two and two and a half, when another child pulled the fire alarm. I imagine the sudden loud noise of the clanging alarm frightened him the first time he heard it. When we picked him up from daycare the afternoon this all happened, Snags said, “A baby pulled the fire alarm!”

That of course, seemed impossible. I mean, how could it be? A baby? Pulled the fire alarm? Babies aren’t tall, they can’t reach the average fire alarm, can they? But we quickly learned that Snags was right. It turned out that Megan, a little girl at the school, was in her teacher’s arms as the teacher stood in the hallway near a fire alarm. Megan, curious babe she was, reached out to the shiny red fire alarm handle and gave it a yank, thus setting off the blaring tones of the alarm, and requiring the entire population of the daycare center to evacuate the building.

Three, almost four years later and Snags has never forgotten this. He has also never forgiven Megan this one transgression for the fear it instilled inside him. And over the years this fear… snowballed, more or less.

The preschool that Snags attended insisted that children keep their shoes on during the day, and the teachers imparted the logic that “You need to keep your shoes on in case there is a fire drill!” to the children to teach them this. I assume they said this because if there was a fire, or even just a drill, that they’d waste precious time putting shoes on 10 or 20 children that had been running around without shoes. Evacuating the building without shoes could be a danger. We wouldn’t want these barefoot raggamuffins to cut their foot on a pebble in the parking lot, right?

And yet somehow, in all of that “keep your shoes on” harping, Snags got it twisted in his head that taking shoes off CAUSED the fire alarm to sound. Shoes on and all was golden. The days were quiet and calm. Shoes off and all would be chaos and the screeching alarm would pierce eardrums and turn children into stone. Or at least that’s how I imagine Snags had made the connection of in his mind. Because once, we were at the mall and Snags saw people trying on shoes. He was half way to the exit door before I caught up with him. “Let’s go! Now!” He cried. “The fire alarm’s going to go off!” I couldn’t convince him otherwise. Nothing I said quelled his fears. He started to cry and shake in fear and as the tears began to roll down his face like a sheet of water over Niagra Falls, I conceded that it might indeed be best if we cut our shopping trip short and left the mall as quickly as we could.

When Snags was three a new student started at his school, and was placed in Snag’s classroom. The child had some discipline problems in that he did exactly everything he was told not to do. Also, he was fond of taking off all his clothes any time he felt like it, which seemed to be approximately every five minutes, or three seconds after the teachers had dragged him out from under the craft table and got him dressed again. And of course, as part of all of this, he took his shoes off.

The teachers admitted that this new child was a challenge, and that he was a disruption to the class and that he upset ALL the other children. EVERY. DAY. It seemed there was nothing they could do about this except wrestle the naked problem child to the ground and forcefully put his clothes back on him. Snags began to dislike school. He’d cry in the mornings that he didn’t want to go to school. It wasn’t fun. Jeremy wouldn’t keep his clothes on… Then one day, Snags’ teacher came to me and DEMANDED that I had to do something about Snags, because every time Jeremy took his shoes off, Snags started to panic and cry because he thought the fire alarm was going to go off, and his crying set the other children crying one by one, until the entire class was a roomful of wiggling, writhing, crying children that no amount of anything could calm.

I didn’t know what I could do. Really, it seemed to me, the teacher should be doing something about Jeremy the problem child who couldn’t or wouldn’t keep his clothes or his shoes on. I shouldn’t have to do anything about Snags for being scared. Besides, I’d already spoken to Snags about this. Ad nauseum. I’d explained that shoes, on or off, were not the switch that controlled the fire alarms. In fact, I’d told him there was no connection there at all. But he insisted it was true. After all, the teachers told them this every day. Keep your shoes on in case there’s a fire drill. Only Snags heard “Keep your shoes on or there WILL BE a fire drill.”

Eventually, the problem child was removed from the school. This wasn’t my doing. One morning we just arrived to find that he wasn’t there, and then he wasn’t there the next day, or the day after that…. And then we learned that the school had asked the family to take the child elsewhere, he was simply too great a disruption, too great a discipline problem, and they couldn’t handle him, shoes or not.

That would seem to be the end of the story except Snags focused his energies on Megan, the child who had pulled the fire alarm that very first time. When she was a baby. She’d been moved up to his classroom, and sometimes at nap time the teachers would set up her cot on the floor directly underneath the fire alarm. Snags monitored this like you’d watch a poisonous snake circling around you. He asked the teachers to move Megan’s cot. “She might pull the fire alarm again,” he warned them.

Over time we got to the point where every morning Snags would demand that I ask the director of the preschool center “Is there going to be a fire drill today?” And every morning she’d say “No. No fire drill today.” This got tiring very fast. I was sick of asking the question and I know the director was tired of answering it. But if we didn’t dance the dance, Snags would be paralyzed with fear, right there in the middle of the hallway, unable to move unless he was promised there wouldn’t be a fire drill frightening him on THAT day.

So, after a few months of this, I got the bright idea to tell Snags that the computer where I signed him in in the mornings had a sentence there each day telling me if there was going to be a fire drill or not. So I’d log him in and say, “No fire drill today!” and he’d audibly breath a sigh of relief and relax a little. Sometimes he would even start to skip down the hallway.

The director of course, knew about Snags’ fear of fire drills. It had been born and bred in her center, after all. I’d asked her every day for months if there was going to be a fire drill. So eventually, when there WAS going to be a fire drill, she’d warn me ahead of time. “We’re having a fire drill tomorrow morning,” she’d say to me as I passed by her office on the way back to my car after depositing Snags safely in his classroom. “I’ll try to do it early, before you arrive.” And for the most part, this worked. I think we went almost 1 ½ years without Snags having to partake in a fire drill of any sort.

But then Kindergarten was upon us. The first day was a shortened day where the students met the teachers and the parents stayed to fill out paper work. We went to this shortened day and all was well. On the second morning, as we headed off to school, Snags told me that “At least they don’t have fire alarms in the classrooms!” It seems he’d scoped out the surroundings and noted that the alarm bells were outside the classroom doors. “Maybe if they have a fire drill it won’t be so loud” he said.

“Don’t worry, Snags!” I told him. There’s no way they’d have a fire drill on the 2nd day of school! That’d be crazy!” I scoffed. And as usual, I saw Snags relax a little.

But I was wrong…

When I picked Snags up from his after school care after his second day of school (his first FULL day of Kindergarten) he ran to me and said “I have something to tell you!”

“Okay, what is it?” I asked.

“Not until we’re in the car!” he said.

So we gathered his lunch box and his back pack and left for the car. Once he was strapped in his booster seat, I sat in the driver’s seat with the car door open and turned to him and said “So, what was it you wanted to tell me?” and he said through gritted teeth “Shut. The. Door!”

“Okay,” I sighed, beginning to worry what he could possibly have to tell me that was so secret the car door had to be shut.

I turned back to him. “Okay, what is it?”

“We. Had. A. Fire. Drill. Today!” He said.

I realized then it was highly unlikely that he would ever trust me again.

Then he went on to explain that during the morning announcements, right after they said The Pledge of Allegiance, the Principal announced that they would be having a fire drill.

“Where you scared?” I asked.

“YES!” Snags replied.

“Did you tell your teacher you were scared and what did she say?” I asked.

“She said it would be okay.” He said.

Snags told me how the class practiced lining up and going outside for the impending fire drill. In place of a real alarm, his teacher made a “beep beep” sound and when she did that, the class had to line up and evacuate to the playground. But they weren’t allowed to play. And then the teacher said the practice was over and they all got to go back inside the building.

Later in the afternoon the Principal came on the loudspeaker again. This time she was ready to actually have the fire drill. She gave the children a one-minute warning. I think they may have counted down. And then, right as the alarm was about to sound, Megan, Oh Megan the child who pulled the fire alarm when she was a baby, screamed “EVERYONE COVER YOUR EARS!”

So Snags was prepared. He knew the alarm was coming. He even knew when to cover his ears and line up and go outside.

He wasn’t THAT scared. He survived.

“But NEXT time,” he told me in a bit of a worried voice, “They aren’t going to WARN us! The Principal said this was the last warning and next time it will be a surprise fire drill!”

And I find it hard to reassure him. I can tell him not to worry. I can tell him it will be okay, because it’s true. I just can’t tell him it won’t be today. Or tomorrow…

***********************************************************

Author’s note: Snags’ elementary school had that “surprise” fire drill TODAY. Tonight, a child who looks like Snags and acts like Snags, but most certainly cannot BE Snags, said to me “I LIKE fire drills!” Upon further inquiry, the imposter child stated that his reason for liking fire drills is “…because we get to go outside!” and also because “…elementary school fire drills don’t frighten me as much as the ones at daycare did…”

And that’s the first step in denial and why I had to get the entire fire drill story down. Because one day, most probably in the near future, this kid of mine will swear he never had a fear of fire drills, that I didn’t spend an entire year asking the daycare center director on a daily basis if there was going to be a fire drill that day.

So whether Snags is 7 or 15, 23 or 30 when he denies this all ever happened, I can say “Oh yes it did! Here, read this. THIS is how it all went down!”

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Filed under alarm, fear, fire drills, humor, life, shoes, Snags